An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The style might be dated, but this amazing work did more than wake Kant up from his “dogmatic slumber”. While its true that Kant’s Critiques set off modern philosophy by providing an inflectional structure for us to better consider the nature of phenomenon, it’s also arguable that Kant’s critiques did not in fact adequately address Hume.
This thick, and well thought book of Hume can be summed in one statement: “If it needs explicit statement then it is not natural” While our conception of natural-ness today has been modified — meaning more (and less) than what Hume would have meant, Hume’s genius lies in grasping that what is common sense, or given as the way of things, is often a way of justifying what is. This is to say that the supposed nature of things is often a little more than a ruse, a stablizing point for social relations… that all things moral, ethical, valuable reflect our human need to determine difference of social standing between one another. It follows then that even our highest conceptions which are to provide elucidation and stability in our norms and practices are in fact methods of convention dictated by mistaking cause for effect.
This is to say that often our reasoning works backwards, to justify what we want to be, rather than working from a position of generality and finding what principles operate on the broadest terms. In contemporaneous terms, Meillasoux would all this Ptolemy’s Revenge as Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” works not to debunk a human centered universe but works explicitly to guarantee that the universe require human consciousness be at the seat of all understanding.
For this reason, many thinkers today (Deleuze seemingly the first) return to Hume as a way to balance out the “waking dogma” of Kant and his successors.
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